The Oubliette at Ak Min Tor

Part 5 Storms and Stories

For days and weeks we marched. The rain never seemed to slack up any. It was one of those years when the bottom kept dropping out of the sky. Storm followed storm and the flood waters just kept getting higher and higher.

They kept the shackles on and we were now having to carry the extra chain that used to be carried by those who didn't make it. The soldiers were having just about as rough a time as we were, so at least that was something. They even lost several of their own number to the flood waters.

There was only one more river to cross, but it was running way up over the banks from where it normally was. The forest was flooded for miles in every direction and we couldn't even get close to it. We had been slopping through the water for so long, the skin on our hands and feet were all wrinkled, and they hurt.

Common sense would have dictated that we either wait for the water to recede, find a boat, or go somewhere else instead. That's the thing with the soldiers of the Gallo ... common sense was in really short supply. Everybody that had any real sense had already been killed, imprisoned, or left the country by now.

They said we were heading to the Sawback, and it was about thirty miles the other side of this river. That meant that no matter what, we were going to cross the thing. Even the soldiers were scared, but when their commander says jump, it's either jump or you're the next one to be in the chains. It's kind of like a Gallo thing I guess.

People like me, those of us who weren't born into a Notable family, we didn't even matter to the Lords. The soldiers were all from the same stock that those of us in the lower castes were, so to the Notables, they were just a means to an end. They were all expendable. The soldiers that were with us knew this too.

They were commanded by a cousin of someone that married into a Notable house. This guy was a real piece of work. Just because of his position, he seemed to think that he was smarter than everybody else. It was his idea in the end to make everybody swim for it.

Swimming is already hard in water that has different speeds at different levels. Now add a long forced march through mud and rough terrain in a season where the rain just won't let up, add a bunch of chains to your guys so they can't swim efficiently at all, and double ... triple the width of a river and see what happens. You guessed it ... we got washed away.

It wasn't too bad at first, because we were all floating downstream in a big bunch. We had to be because we were all chained together. We all tried to swim toward the nearest bank, but that seemed to be our undoing. The bank wasn't where it usually was, but was out into the forest for a long ways. The current was almost as strong in the flooded area as it was out in the channel.

It was when we began to be separated by trees, that were now part of the river, that we started having problems. Half of our group would pass on one side and the other half would be pushed on the other side. It took a lot of effort to pull people up and around the trees, one at a time.

Just getting off of a tree didn't even help us out much. When everybody was on the same side of a tree, we would be on our way down the river again. It was all we could do to get loose from one group of trees, only to get hung up on another.

Fatigue began to set in and heads began to dip below the water. After a while, they didn't come up any more. There just wasn't any way to get off the chain, and there wasn't any way to get the bodies off the chain now. It threatened to drown us all.

We got hung up for quite a while around several trees. One of the guys that didn't make it was pushed right into me. His dead face was up against mine. I don't think I ever knew this one's name, but I'll never forget his face. We kept moving back and forth for a while, bumping face to face. I could see him staring at me with those glazed eyes, even when I closed my own eyes. It could have been me just as easy as him.